Would You Personally Pay for the News You Consume Online? (Poll)

There’s an interesting question raised on TechDirt today - the question of online news and their naturally free distribution. The item arrives as a response to a post on the UK Telegraph blog where Shane Richmond addresses the complains of various newspaper executives worried about the fact that they can not charge for access to their news online because other publications (blogs and various news aggregating sites included) offer news for free - often much faster than newspapers manage to serve the same piece of news.

I can agree 100% that fundamentally news should be free and available for everyone to consume simply because when news is abundant, it should become free. And this is exactly what we see with online news - there is no competition between consumers for news but there is an increasing competition between various news outlets fighting for those precious eyeballs and trying hard to make people consume the news on their sites for free hoping to earn something off ads.

And while I do understand that it is absolutely natural for people not to want to pay for information when it can easily be obtained for free, I still think there must be cases when the paid-for information provides the value significant enough to turn consumers of free information into paying customers. What’s more, people actually paying for information are not really inconsiderable in number.

Take journalists and professional bloggers. Do you really think that we all get the news we cover from the tips submitted by our readers and from the corporate blogs of the companies we cover? Unfortunately I’ll have to disappoint you: there are bloggers and new media people paying for access to the major wire services to be able to get the news as soon as our rivals from traditional media outlets and trying to outperform those rivals in the speed of coverage due to simpler publishing procedures we employ. In some cases wires are the only way to get the information quickly to be competitive and get a chance to brag one more time about blogs outperforming traditional media in coverage of this or that event.

The next category of people already paying for the news they get via online channels are various investors and traders looking to be 100% informed on the news of the companies with stock in their portfolio. After all, it is the information that usually sends the prices upwards or downwards (though it’s really hard to say that the market has been all that logical recently but that looks more like an exception). It is understandable that when crucial information can turn into huge gains or losses, consumers will be quite willing to pay.

And of course there are still some newspapers that charge for access to some of their content even online - including Financial Times used as an example by the Telegraph blogger.

So the examples are here and there are already people paying for the information they want to consume online. I hope that these people will only grow in numbers as the way internet operates changes with time. After all, many of us are way too afraid of relying 100% on advertising as a source of income - hence alternative options may be eventually introduced.

For example, I remember Allen Stern coming up with a suggestion of offering blog readers full-text RSS feed for a small fee but without any ads that bloggers trying to monetize our blogs often serve right in the feeds. What if some readers value a blog or a general news publication enough to support it with some small amount of money (provided that it’s easy to pay and offers some added value)?

So I wanted to ask a question to all the readers of this primarily news site: do you think you could afford a certain amount in your monthly budget to allocate to reading the news sources that you really enjoy? And if so, how much would you be prepared to pay per month. Also it will be great to hear your comments explaining this or that choice.

Poll Answers

Image by lumaxart used under Creative Commons